English Collocations with Plan

Today I have some English collocations with plan or dealing with plans, either single or plural.

Audacious plan, to carry out plan, an ingenious plan, to shelve a plan, to jettison a plan

English Collocations with Plan - Podcast Episode 126

Harry

Harry is a native English teacher with over 10 years of experience both online and in face-to-face lessons. With his extensive experience in business, he specialises in Business English lessons but happily teaches ESL students with any English learning needs.

This is Harry and welcome back to my English learning podcast Speak Better English with Harry where I try to help you understand and make better use of your English.

Share and help other students to improve English skills

So I’ve got a number of English collocations which go together with plan or plans and I’ll try and explain them to you.

Intermediate to Advanced English Marathon

INSANITY: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Albert Einstein

What you'll learn:
better understanding of more complex grammar structures
advanced English vocabulary words
British & American slang
perfect your listening skills through practing different accents

This marathon is for you if you're:
stuck at an intermediate English level
tired of confusing explanations
a mature student
shy & introverted

So we can have bold plans or a bold plan.

We can have audacious plans or an audacious plan.

We can have daring plans or a daring plan.

And an ingenious plan.

So bold, daring, audacious and ingenious basically have the same meaning. Means something really exciting, something that somebody else might not try.

Example:

There’s a bold plan to develop the 5G network throughout the country so that every house can have 5G in fast internet connection.

A bold plan because there are millions of houses that have to be upgraded.

We can have a daring plan to rescue people that have been kidnapped by some terrorist organization.

A daring plan, which involves counter-espionage and certain soldiers who work in covert operations. So they operate in secrecy. So they’re going to try and rescue these people who have been kidnapped or held to ransom.

Share and help other students to improve English skills

We can have an audacious plan.

Audacious means something really nobody else would have thought about.

Example:

They had an audacious plan to overthrow the government by refusing to vote or to demonstrate outside the parliament buildings and bring pressure on the government.

Something that other political groups had not considered. An audacious plan, really something that nobody had considered.

An ingenious plan meaning a very clever plan, something again that nobody had considered because it was just too ingenious, too clever.

So bold plans, daring plans, audacious plans – quite risky audacious plans – or an ingenious plan.

Example:

They developed an ingenious plan to get to Mars.

An ingenious plan to get to Mars by, first of all, flying to the moon, building a station on the moon, extracting water from some resource that they’ve discovered on the moon, creating energy and then flying to Mars. Okay.

English Collocations with Plan

We can also shelve of a plan, meaning to put it on the shelf, we’re not going to go ahead with it.

So literally like when you take a book and you’ve finished reading it, you put it on the shelf because you’re not going to to read it any more.

So when we have a plan, and we shelve the plan, literally we pick it up and put it somewhere because we’ve decided that, okay, might be a good plan, but now is not the time to implement it. So we’ve shelved plans.

Example:

The government have shelved plans to extend the runway in Heathrow airport.

To abandon plans.

Well, abandon is a little bit more serious than that. We had a plan, but because of cost overruns, we’ve abandoned it.

We’ve just decided, it’s not going to go ahead.

We’ve downed tools, as the say, and decided to pull out.

Example:

The County Council had abandoned plans to make some upgrades to the water system.

English Collocations with Plan

We can scrap plans.

To scrap something means to make it redundant. A scrap is something that’s no longer have any value. Like an old car, that is 25 years old and rusted, is only worth scrap. Meaning we break it up and use the good parts, but discard the rest. So we can scrap a plan, like a bit of paper. We roll it up in a ball and we throw it away.

Example:

Unfortunately, they have scrapped the plans of reintroducing it.

The more former word to say to jettison a plan.

Jettison is often used in the shipping industry when a ship is at sea and it has a dirty water or something, it jettisons it, it throws it literally into the water.

Or an airplane if it’s circling overhead and has to make an emergency landing, it will, first of all, jettison some fuel to reduce the weight. So to jettison or to scrap it or to get rid of it. Okay.

So these are the words that collocate with plan: